Seattle Pacific University MFA | Creative Writinghttp://blog.spu.edu/mfa
Mon, 09 Feb 2015 21:09:14 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1The Creationist Crisis Reprisehttp://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/02/09/the-creationist-crisis-reprise/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/02/09/the-creationist-crisis-reprise/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 21:06:20 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1748Continue Reading...]]>Several months ago I blogged about the Ken Ham Bill Nye debate at Liberty University. I hadn’t given the two much thought since then until last week when they both rose back into the media. My son’s Popular Science magazine arrived with Nye on the front, his fists wrapped like a boxer’s, and the title of the article about him: Nerd Fight! The same day, Ham hit the news as a butt of jokes for blogging that intelligent alien life cannot exist because, “the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation… To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.”

What struck me about the Ham kerfuffle is how this arises from the same place that his strict stance on young earth creationism does. At its core, this is not about the science; it is about hermeneutics.

After my post about the LU debate, I had a brief exchange with a commenter who identified himself as Paul. Paul took issue with my calling Ken Ham a biblical literalist—and my saying that this was the reason he could not look at the scientific evidence honestly.

In our subsequent exchange, Paul made the following assertions:

If you interpret Genesis as figurative, that cause problems with what the Bible says elsewhere (example: Romans 5:12 says that death is a result of sin, but if evolution is true then death existed before Adam and Eve existed).

Of course the days in Genesis 1 are 24-hour days. If they weren’t, you’d have problems with Exodus 20:11, Exodus 31:17, as well as other verses. So, yes, it is natural to read Genesis 1 as literal 24-hour days.

Like I said, when Ken Ham responded with “I’m a Christian”, I think he means that there is no scientific or historical evidence that would contradict the Christian worldview.

What does one part of scripture’s relation to another have to do with an analysis of scientific evidence?

The basic theology behind what Paul calls the Christian worldview, and this insistence on young-earth creationism is Premillennial Dispensationalism. It was developed in the late 1800s by John Nelson Darby and it harmonizes the entire Bible into an all-encompassing story of the entire universe. It is a map, a guide for looking at history, judging present crises, and knowing with certainty what will come in the future.

According to this system, the purpose of all creation is God’s relationship with humanity, which he carries out according to seven different governing systems or dispensations:

1. Innocence: begins with the literal six-day creation and ends when Adam and Eve screw up

2. Conscience: everyone screws this up and has to be drowned, except for Noah and his family

3. Government: this takes us from Noah to the promise that Abraham will father nations

4. Promise: from Abraham to Moses and the Law

5. Law: this dispensation takes us from Moses to Jesus

6. Grace: the dispensation in which we are living right now

7. Millennial Kingdom: after the Rapture and the seven years of the Great Tribulation

Before the first dispensation is eternity past, in which only God exists, and after the thousand-year rule of the Millennial Kingdom is eternity future, in which human beings exist consciously in heaven or hell.

I remember Sunday school charts in the dank church basement depicting all of existence, past present and future. With some variations—I remember some hot controversies over whether or not Christians would be raptured before the Great Tribulation or suffer through it—this is the basic timeline.

It is a tightly structured harmonization of the entire Bible into a categorical universal history, coupled with the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy—the Bible does not contain one iota of mistaken or false information—at the root of young earth creationists’ refusal to look honestly at the scientific evidence. If one tenet falls, the whole system collapses.

The belief system they’ve been taught all their lives is a theology of one calcified piece, each point taught with the same absolute certainty as every other. They begin to notice oddities in this theological landscape. A stone seems fake, held in place unnaturally—say the doctrine of verbal, plenary biblical inspiration and its subsequent inerrancy; or the prohibition against women in the ministry; or the insistence on a literal, twenty-four-hour, six-day creation six thousand years ago—and they get suspicious, start to kick around.

They kick away a stone—decide, for example, that they cannot believe in a literal talking snake causing all the world’s woes any more than they could believe in a literal, historical Pandora. The one stone falls away, and then another falls after it, and with that the collapse begins.

The ground crumbles from beneath them in outward circles like ripples on water. Everything their lives were built on falls away until they are floating, totally unmoored, casting about among the twisting and drifting fragments of their childhood faith, trying to cobble something together that they can live with.

When I was young, I heard more than once in church that if a single scientific or historical claim in Scripture was wrong then none of it could be trusted. It terrified me because even at a young age I recognized inconsistencies and seeming contradictions in the texts.

It came as a great relief years later to realize Biblical literalism is not the only option, the Christian worldview is bigger, and richer, and deeper than that. It is quite possible to be a Christian who engages the scientific community without the spirit of fear.

This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation’s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos.

Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.

]]>http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/02/09/the-creationist-crisis-reprise/feed/0Righteous Minds Left and Righthttp://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/02/04/righteous-minds-left-and-right/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/02/04/righteous-minds-left-and-right/#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 20:37:10 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1741Continue Reading...]]>The orthodontist’s new office has a waiting room tricked out with video games—even a genuine old tabletop Mrs. Pac-Man. Grace and I were racing cars—and she was winning by more than a lap—when the woman in purple scrubs called her name.

“Hey Grace,” she drawled, as Grace approached her. She had frosty blond hair and friendly blue eyes, and cool running shoes under those purple scrubs, rocking the hip-grandma look. She swung her arm in a wide come-on wave and said, “You’re coming too, Mom and Dad.”

Later, when Gracie’s mother complimented her on how easy she makes her job look, she said, “I’ve been doing this for forty-five years.” She joked and teased in just the right ways to put Grace at ease as she lay back and opened her mouth for the light stretching on its long arm toward her.

After the orthodontist examined her and discussed the braces—and oral surgery—our hip grandma was back with the pricing sheet. She was just as good at this part, had the numbers written neatly, the math done, clear and simple. She said, “You have good insurance. Insurance usually doesn’t cover this much.”

Gracie’s mother and I both said this was great news, good to hear.

Then she added, “And they never will again now, because of Obamacare.” As she emphasized the O word, her pretty smile curled into a crisp sneer. Then just as quickly, it was gone and she had moved on to the next line of numbers.

I was not surprised by the political interjection. Nor was I surprised when, describing a new doctor on staff, she said, “We are so blessed to have him.” I was on the conservative side of town. On the other side of town, we would have been just as likely to hear a comment from the opposite side of the Affordable Care Act controversy—just as opinionated, and just as inappropriate for the circumstances.

My town has two distinct personalities: one side is die-hard right wing conservative and the other side is just as staunchly on the left. I have watched these two sides do battle in a bumper sticker war. The Darwin fish (an ichthus with feet) popped up to counter the Jesus fish; another ichthus came along with the Jesus fish swallowing the Darwin fish food-chain style. Slogans are volleyed back and forth: equal rights for unborn women, and keep your theology off my biology; God bless America, and God bless the whole world, no exceptions; marriage God’s design (a silhouette of a man, a plus sign, and a silhouette of a woman), and the blue and yellow equal sign.

As I teach on one side of town and then the other, I often find myself in the company of conservative Christians who cannot fathom how someone calling herself Christian could be liberal, and hours later in the company of liberals who boggle over how someone claiming to follow Jesus could be conservative. Over the past several years, I have watched these responses turn from wonder to animosity. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, surely you agree that the increasing polarization is troubling.

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt shares a wealth of research on this issue. He uses the word righteous not with its current connotations of religion and judgmentalism, but from the original “just, upright, virtuous.” As ugly as the rhetoric is becoming, it is a fact that many on both sides are doing what they sincerely believe to be upright and virtuous.

Haidt begins with the question, “How can honest and sincere people come to opposite conclusions?” His research maps out the moral foundation of politics, which he places in six basic categories: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, liberty/oppression. What he discovers is that consistently liberals have a three-foundation morality (care, fairness, liberty) while conservatives have a six-foundation morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty).

This leads to competing grand narratives. While liberals tell a story of progress toward a more caring and fair society, conservatives tell a story of defending moral foundations against forces that ever work to erode them. These appear to be—and in the realm of politics are—opposing narratives.

The truth is however that both sides make legitimate and correct claims. Our society operates within what Haidt calls a “moral exoskeleton,” a set of values that makes a society possible. Liberals rightly claim this moral exoskeleton is imperfect, needs fixing. Conservatives rightly maintain that it will not do to bring the whole thing crashing down. “You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive.”

Haidt offers a couple of suggestions for reaching a more civil politics, which might or might not work, but does not spend much time on them. His purpose for the book is simply to explain how good people can reach such differing opinions about important issues.

Could it be that the first necessary step is to admit that, whatever side you are on, you can get nowhere without faith that the other side is also “composed of good people who have something important to say”? Is it naive to believe it is possible?

Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic athttp://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.

Monks in the Orthodox tradition have long believed that God’s love is unchanging, constant, like the light of the sun. We do not need to appease a deity’s anger or perform well to turn the light of God’s affection and gaze upon us. It’s just there, divine mercy blazing away, pouring down all the time.

The problem, these elders say is that our minds—our nouses, or the window to our hearts—have been darkened, like crusty basement windows.

We can be trapped in this basement, and when the illumination starts to seep through, the pure character of God shines through a soiled pane, a clouded filter of our psyches, wounds, fears.

“All the shit that’s been put on us?” a new member in our jail group asked as part of our discussion, “Our dad beatin’ the shit outta us? The cops, the judges, and all the grimy things we done to others, to our women, to ourselves? Kinda like that?”

I thought it was a good summary of how many Christians’ images of God, especially in the West, are still shaped and darkened by guilt and experiences with authority.

I told the guys in red scrubs more of what the monks think about this darkened minds business: although we can do nothing to earn God’s love or turn His ever-shining light upon us, what we can do is get to work removing the internal rubble.

That’s what they call askesis, ascetic practices. Or praxis. Ceaseless prayer, all-night vigils, renunciation of possessions, silence, confession, service to others—all the hardcore religious stuff for which monks are best known. It’s not penance, self-punishment, as I used to assume. It’s a way of scrubbing at those windows to our hearts.

“You’re talking bout gettin’ some Windex on that, then!”

I suggested we experiment with this askesis. Not just talk about it. I asked if any of the guys had ever tried fasting. There was silence. They looked around at each other. One guy from a churchy childhood said he thinks he did that once. Others laughed about how little—and disgusting—the food portions are in jail.

I told them I had no great personal story about fasting, though I’d messed around with it all my Christian life. But, I said, my friend in a distant prison, in solitary confinement, had written telling me how he’d decided to fast.

He’d read in a book I’d mailed him, Mountain of Silence, full of interviews with a holy elder in a monastery in Cyprus, about how the monks are constantly fasting. So he tried it. He wrote how he’d been going three days straight, and after the initial hunger and irritation, he felt more “energized, awake, clean.” He saw more things in Scripture and could write longer letters without distraction.

So, I told the guys, I’d be willing to try it for one straight week if they did, too. “All week,” I said, “let’s pass on breakfast and lunch, eat only dinner, use the time and growling stomachs as internal alarms to pray a little more. And see what happens.”

That week, on a Tuesday, I met up with an Orthodox poet for lunch at his house on the Puget Sound. He has spent a lot of time as a pilgrim on Mount Athos, a misty island in Greece swarming with monks in crumbling old hives humming with prayer. He laughed and told me the inmates and I were doing it all wrong.

“So stop it,” he smiled, swilled a little single malt, and passed me the salami. “It’s just Wednesdays and Fridays. Not all week. And even then, you still eat. Just lay off the meat, brother. Even overdoing asceticism can be its own indulgence.”

But the next night I visited one of the men in our jail group in a small holding cell with a bare table. He had tattoos all over his scalp and neck, a young Mexican gang member. “So I been doing that fasting you told us about, right?” he began. “And I had nightmares every night for the first few days.”

They were like videotapes, “of all the shit I did those years in prison—you know?” The visitation cell might have been tapped, so he tilted his head and I knew he was referring to the many unspeakable and violent acts he’d felt obligated to perform in order to survive in various prisons. Things he’d told me about on long car rides to probation appointments before he’d gotten arrested this time.

“I’m telling you: three straight nights, when I started fasting, I had nightmares of all that. Like I was seeing it all from the upper corner of my cell, looking down. Like a security camera, you know? Shit I forgot all about; it all came up at night. I’d wake up in sweats, my heart pounding. But I’d feel ok in the morning. And now—I don’t know—I feel hella good. I pray more during the day and I got the homies on the tier joining me with a little psalm at nights.”

How is it that going without food opens up deep chambers in the mind, heart, spirit? I’ve read some of the new science about how interconnected the stomach is with the brain, the “gut mind.” Maybe monks with their fasting have always known that the stomach is a tangible backdoor to the mind and heart, one we can clear and open. With askesis, spiritual Windex.

The homie started getting visions after the nightmares: how he wanted to use his tattoo design skills to work on art with local kids, and get them gardening. “I wanna get out soon now,” he wrote me, “and not waste my life in prison. You know I got so much I can do out there, I just wish I would have done it before.”

I told him at our next visit how several months with a good therapist might barely get that kind of darkness from his nightmares to surface in a healing way. And to then discover his own gifts in a new light! And it came about for free, in a county jail cell, when one prisoner in America’s sprawling prison system voluntarily took on an ascetic practice. Like fasting.

“I know,” he shrugged, never having met a therapist. “Crazy, huh?”

Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com.

In the “burpees” the guys often showed me after they were home from prison—in their driveways and garages, always getting my heart thumping in my throat and a sweat in my shirt sooner than I expect—I recognized the Orthodox monks’ prostrations I’d learned in the monastery.

The homies in their tight tank tops and huge jeans began upright, then hit fists to their abs, bent down to a full bow, touching knees, then the ground, dropping to pushup position, and back up.

Many guys I know who go off to prison come back home more physically fit, even if spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, they return less alive, burdened with more of the very armor, trauma, rage, secrets, numbness, and sin that monasteries aim to remove.

Not only is there less junk food, an absence of soda, and regimented bedtimes and wakeups in prison; not only is weight-lifting a popular pastime for most men doing hard time; but gang members especially—most of those I pastor—are required among their ranks to constantly train, using burpees as a whole-body workout that fits inside their narrow cells.

They are expected to always be ready for battle.

Monks look at their rigorous practices in a similar way: preparing the instincts of their minds and hearts for spiritual battle in their cells, so that they don’t get so easily beat up by all the temptations, demons, thoughts, fears, anxieties, illusions, and torments that assault the human heart daily.

“We need exercises,” I read from one monk, “to overcome these maladies.” I underlined that part of the book.

I suppose I’d assumed all the bowing and religious physical movements I’d seen performed by monks in movies to be antiquated, pathological expressions of guilt, quivering penance, the anxiety of a slave who knew nothing of love.

But at the monastery I grew interested in these movements—like when I visited my friend’s mixed martial arts and boxing gym. I saw him quit drugs, lose weight, and grow in maturity, all while he moved across the mat in bizarre calisthenics with other young men weaning themselves off video games and bong hits.

The gym offered more for him, recently out of jail, than my weekly small group where we’d read the gospels, pray, and share dinner. The gym engaged his body. It demanded more from him than his mind. He left at night with more peace.

This Lenten prayer of Saint Ephraim I was learning in the monastery was more demanding, too. And it gave me a new peace. It strengthened my easily discouraged heart and pushed me to shed the spiritual fat that slows one down. It was the monks’ burpee, a whole body spiritual rutina.

So I showed it to the guys at the jail a few months ago. It would be my first monastic contribution to the conversation we’d started the week before about ways to turn their lockdown sentence into a monk-like spiritual retreat and training.

But as we pushed the chairs in our circle back against the wall in the jail’s cold, bare multipurpose room, I ended up talking about how much I myself—and so many other people who’ve never been to a monastery or a jail—need such practices.

Guys in red scrubs stood there as I talked about the wave of my generation pouring into yoga studios, where we can step out of our busy lives into a place set apart, out of a butt-in-chair overly cerebral posture at work, at a computer, and at church, and into a position where our bodies help our spirits open, where they stretch and rise and surrender together.

Learning how to use our time, in our cells or in our bedrooms, I said, requires some ancient practices.

“Like spiritual burpees,” I added. “Something to use in your cells during lockdown.”

The guys with tattoos on their scalps and necks nodded, smiled at each other, and we began Saint Ephraim’s prayer of repentance together.

I’m not sure what the guards thought when they looked through their side of the observation mirror, or through the surveillance camera mounted high in the ceiling corner to watch a chaplain in sneakers and twelve other guys in red—bearded old white guys, Swinomish Natives, fidgety youngsters recently off meth, tattooed Mexican shotcallers in the cell block—all getting on the ground, butts in the air, surrendering, but not to the system. To something unseen.

With all the mixed signals firing between these highly guarded men in the circle with me, I’m not sure what each guy was thinking either. Many hesitated when we bent over, and placed our hands on the painted concrete floor.

But I could feel the group’s tension dissolve as our heads touched the cold ground together, absorbed into a new, opened space of humility and mercy.

And a great silence, inside and out.

Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com. Read part 1 in Chris’s “Monasticism in Lockdown America” series for “Good Letters” here.

]]>http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/21/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-3/feed/0Monasticism in Lockdown America, Part 2http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/12/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-2/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/12/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-2/#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 21:27:26 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1721Continue Reading...]]>Earlier this year during Lent, I visited a Russian Orthodox monastery on an evergreen island out across the water from Seattle. I’d never been there before, but this local pilgrimage felt somehow familiar.

After the ferry ride across the chilly waters with seagulls in the air, the drive through the woodsy, misty island on winding roads, away from major cities or even a simple corner store, and finally pulling up to a locked gate where I could push a button and announce myself as a visitor, I realized this was exactly like my visits to the various prisons in my state over the last ten years.

As a chaplain in my local Skagit County Jail, I end up visiting the men who are sentenced and shipped off to distant super-max security facilities. The complexes are guarded, somewhat hidden worlds, without much signage out front. There’s usually an obscure road to turn down, and always the little intercom to announce yourself at the gate.

I drove up the hill, past huge, beautiful eight-pointed crosses and old-school icons of Christ, nestled among the mossy timbers and dripping sword ferns, watching me. But unlike how I tighten and tense up, stepping into a prison complex with its sharp surveillance, I felt my insides open; my senses expand inside this monastery’s gate.

The monks at this little monastery—all three of them—were expecting me on this day.

After the youngest monk with his small, scraggly beard showed me to my cell, I washed up and approached the church. It had a blue onion dome on top, like in a small Russian village. The heavy door shut me behind me. It was dark and wonderful. Candles. Incense. Icons covering the walls. But it was small, the size of a living room, and had no chairs, no pews on which to sit down.

The books I’d begun to read on Orthodox worship had told me about this. It wasn’t just about standing in the presence of God with reverence. The church—and especially the monastery—was a kind of spiritual gym, I’d read, where we are strengthened in mind, body, attention, and heart, to bear the weight of God’s love. Where the illness of sin can be dealt with, overcome.

The liturgy talks about receiving Christ’s body and life-blood “for the remission of sins.” Remission, like what happens to a cancer survivor, with proper treatment and a full, healthy lifestyle.

So I followed along. The two elderly monks moving around up front, by the big icons, kept bowing. So I bowed. I stood. I listened as they chanted on. I shifted my weight when my legs got tired.

But there came a part in their prayerful workout that hit me like an especially good chorus in a new song. The old monk spread his arms, his back to me, and said, “O Lord and Master of my life, Give me not a spirit of idleness, despair, ambition, or empty talk.”

And then he tried to kneel.

I later learned that after three decades of such daily bowing, kneeling, and prostrating round the clock, both he and the long-white-bearded abbot had undergone hip replacements.

When I saw his shaky hint at a prostration—I’d read about this too—I took it as an invitation, as a younger man, to sink down and fully kneel myself, alone in the back by the door. I rested my head on the ground. It felt refreshing. To name ambition, despair, and put my head with my palms on the carpet. It felt like something I’d needed for years but it hadn’t been prescribed, or I’d forgotten it was available to me.

I wanted to stay there, in this posture that felt more right to me than most of my own wandering prayers.

The monk, however, was back upright now. “But rather,” he continued, “a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love—Give to me your humble servant.”

And back down we went.

It went on like this for a few more strikingly vulnerable prayers. Up on feet, down flat on face, and back up.

It reminded me of the prison workouts so many gang members have taught me upon their release.

“Burpees,” most inmates call them. Sometimes in their garages, sometimes in the apartment driveways between cars, sometimes in backyards, these guys proudly guide me through the motions that had kept them skinny, strong, and sane the years they were away.

To be continued tomorrow.

Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com. Read part 1 in Chris’s “Monasticism in Lockdown America” series for “Good Letters” here.

]]>http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/12/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-2/feed/0Monasticism in Lockdown America, Part 1http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/06/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-1/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/06/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-1/#commentsTue, 06 Jan 2015 20:02:51 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1710Continue Reading...]]>The gentlemen I’ve been visiting in my local jail for the past decade live a daily existence, I’ve often considered, not unlike monks in the monastery I’ve also visited.

They don’t have their wives or girlfriends with them. They all wear the same plain garment—not black robes, but old red scrubs. Their hair often grows scraggly, as they—like monks—don’t have many mirrors. They don’t care what they look like. The food isn’t very flavorful. They’re cut off from what used to be their lives, their own hustles and habits.

Their contact with those outside—overpriced collect calls, the occasional letter—is limited. A good number of them spend a great deal of time praying, reading, writing, contemplating their lives on a level deeper than they would have outside these walls. They spend most of the day in small rooms called cells.

The most important and obvious difference, I tell them, is that the monks I’ve met choose to live this way.

Why?

The monks want to know God more fully. And they think such an environment can help. I tell the guys that the monks I’ve visited—both Catholic and Orthodox—seek in such cloisters to shed their false selves, turning away from their distractions and the illusions society offers. They seek to become bare before God, exposing their truest selves, their hidden need.

They want their hearts to be broken, and filled, and expanded with the love of God.

For thousands of years, I stress, men and women have thought such a stark environment to be helpful for such difficult work. A place set apart from the world to pray.

This is why, after all, I myself go to the jail.

I go as often as I can, at least one afternoon a week, if not more. When I tell the guys I wish I could stay the night, spend a few weeks or months in there with them, they laugh and say they can suggest all sorts of ways they can help me end up in there. We’ve several times, half-serious, brainstormed some technical infractions that could land me in there, red scrubs and all, with minimal damage to my ability to return as a chaplain one day.

But misdemeanors aside, the men in the circle of chairs often ask why I come at all, when I don’t have to. “This is my favorite church,” I say. “I’ve been coming here for years.”

That part is no joke.

The mercy of God is what I seek. It is what I love. And so I want to be around it, the way my outdoorsy friends can’t stay off the trails or off the Cascade peaks; the way birders’ necks crane at the slightest song in the leaves; the way rock addicts stand front row at a concert and feel the raw emotion vibrate through their bones; the way art lovers frequent museums and galleries.

For me, nothing can beat that elusive, invisible rush of heavenly mercy making contact with a crushed heart. I want it to wash through me, repeatedly, to take the normal grime of boredom, ambition, anxiety, and despair off me, over and over again. I want it make me soft once again, soak my calloused edges, freshen my mind—that I might smell of bright, sweet tenderness and mercy when I leave, for a few hours, maybe.

I go to the jail as a volunteer chaplain the way drunks hit a local bar. Some wouldn’t mind staying through the night.

Mercy, like music, hums better in certain venues, in certain conditions of heart. Monks, in their chosen walls, are keenly aware of their need for mercy. That is, their sin. And apart from a monastery, I tell the men, the jail is probably the best place to be among people who are also faced with what a mess they really are.

“So if you guys already have such a monastery-like place here, would you want to go ahead and learn some of the ways monks use their time? How to use your cells, in this merciless system, to become students of mercy? Want to learn some of the ways they think and pray, which I’m starting to practice in my own life?”

I’ve opened with something like this the last several groups I’ve led. It always surprises me how happy they seem with the whole idea.

I warn them that there’re some repetitive, simple prayers and physical postures—lots of bowing, knees and hands and foreheads on the hard ground.

They’re in, they tell me.

I guess I’m expecting that they’d ask me to get back to a Bible study as usual. Or just look around awkwardly at this monastic stuff. Or dispute the comparison between an abbey and jail.

But they’ve been into it. Maybe it’s because these men facing criminal charges, trapped in a facility, are no different than the many of us on the outside looking for “spiritual retreats,” visiting monasteries in deserts and on coastlines and in rural plains.

In my next few “Good Letters” posts, I will continue this small series exploring the overlap between monastic spirituality and the men I pastor who are inside the growing reality of “lockdown America”—a nation with more people behind bars, per capita, than any other in the world. I will recount specific practices we’re trying inside the local jail, as well as a recent visit to an Orthodox monastery with a man just released from solitary confinement.

Till next month.

Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley. His first book, WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders comes out from HarperOne in February 2015. Learn more at chris-hoke.com.

]]>http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2015/01/06/monasticism-in-lockdown-america-part-1/feed/0Cheers to the World Cuphttp://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2014/07/18/cheers-to-the-world-cup/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2014/07/18/cheers-to-the-world-cup/#commentsFri, 18 Jul 2014 18:19:20 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1704Continue Reading...]]>I met a friend in the local hipster bar to watch what was to be the U.S. team’s final game of the World Cup. An exciting game, we left with a loss that felt like a win. I was at the beach when the U.S. played Portugal and Germany.

I was a serious soccer player in high school, planned to play in college until a senior-year leg injury (not on the field) took me out, so I was ready to watch some soccer no matter who was playing; I didn’t know about my family. They caught the excitement. We had not cheered this way for a sports team as a family ever before—even my kids who don’t watch sports on television and don’t particularly care for soccer.

But what I felt this time around watching the World Cup most strongly is a sense of pride in being American that I haven’t felt for a long time. It appears that we are having dealings with the rest of the world on equal and friendly terms. Americans on the field are simply men on the field, just like the ones from Ghana and Portugal and Germany, and every other nation. There is competition, but it is (mostly) friendly, and filled with admiration for a well-played ball no matter who makes the play. (My wife has complained that it is still a world of men, and I can’t disagree with that.)

Years ago I read an essay, and can’t remember where, that traced our national character through sport. When baseball became our national sport, our culture was agrarian, small town. Long lazy afternoons in the heat of summer, when the crops were growing on their own, spent playing ball in a dusty field. Baseball is a pastoral sport, the essay claimed, studied and cerebral. The rise of football marks a shift from this pastoral ideal to a heroic warrior ideal. A calm evening of balls cracking on bats and glove slaps can no longer compete with the bursts of speed and violence that is smash-mouth football.

What of soccer in all of this? Does it really matter in the United States? When a British commentator said during the Belgium game, “Things are at a standstill in the United States,” the bar burst out in laughter. Yet this bar was full with an audience (much younger than my friend and me) raised in soccer leagues.

Writing for Quartz, John McDuling observed that, “while soccer will never unseat baseball as the national pastime, or football as the national sport, it is finally settling into a sustainable place in the country’s psyche.”

Does our sport really mean anything about our character, or our relationship to the rest of the world? It is nice to think maybe it does, as Galia Press-Barnathan does when he writes, “The World Cup games indeed reflect and symbolize a sense of global fraternity and rejoicing in this popular and beautiful sport, and provide a stage for states to compete with each other and empower themselves by peaceful means.”

On the evening of the Portugal game, I stood on the deck enjoying the warm ocean breeze and a garbage truck rumbled up to dump the trash from the previous cottage residents. Two Latino men jumped out in blue coveralls and bounded around the truck. The dirty green garbage bin came up to his shoulders, stuffed to overflowing with white bags.

When one of the men pulled on the bin, an empty milk jug fell out into the road. In smooth, graceful movements, he rainbow kicked the jug and juggled it: one, two, three, four, five times, caught it in his hands and threw it into the truck. When he glanced up at me, I gave him a thumbs-up and he responded with a grin and a nod. The men jumped in the truck and drove on, but in that momentary exchange, a feeling of good will passed between us—it was the World Cup, we both knew, that had created it.

Sports fans in the United States generally get their sense of community by gathering in a stadium with people they don’t know for the most part to cheer for kids who are from somewhere else. The World Cup is different at least in that we can have this sense of national pride in our boys who played their hearts out and, as more than one commentator wrote, “left it all out there on the field.” It felt good to cheer for our boys.

However, as Laurent Dubois points out, “John Brooks, Jermaine Jones, Timothy Chandler, Fabian Johnson, and Julian Green.… All five are the sons of African-American servicemen and German mothers, and four of them were born in Germany (Green was born in Florida but moved to Germany when he was 2). They grew up in Germany and, crucially, learned to play in the excellent football academies that have made that country the global football power that it is.”

The United States is recruiting from its diaspora, which is “part of the massive and unequaled U.S. military presence abroad.”

After the Portugal game, my sister laughed and read aloud a comedian’s Tweet that the game almost made him want to learn the rules of soccer and find out where Portugal is. This made me think of another bit of humor I saw posted somewhere on social media a few years ago: “War is how the United States teaches its children geography.”

Fleeting and insubstantial as it might be, it still felt good to be the United States on the international stage, dealing with other countries big and small, “without,” as a man sitting at the bar beside me said, “feeling like we have to have our heels on everyone else’s throat.”

Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.

I recognize upon approaching this third score of years that the initial two have been largely peripatetic. The first score’s wanderings were undetermined by me, contingent upon my parents’ choices—graduate school, better jobs, a new house. Before the age of sixteen, I’d lived in ten different homes. My second score echoed the first for similar reasons, though its upheavals were at least ostensibly of my own choosing—the beginnings and ends of marriages, jobs, graduate schools.

Of all the places I’ve stopped and started, Mississippi will always be my home, a sort of default way of being as much as a place.

On sleepless nights, I close my eyes and trace the geography of the small town where my family spent the last twenty-five years, where I lived from fifth grade to high school graduation, and to which I have returned countless times, sometimes for months at a stretch. I map the homes along Grand Avenue in Yazoo City on the flat edge of the Delta, bestriding the last loess bluffs drenched with the new-grape smell of kudzu blossoms and the magenta extravagance of azaleas.

There are other sights as intrinsic in memory where my sojourns proved shorter—the wide-lawned Victorians of Hyde Park on the southwesterly fringes of Boston where once I made my home, its yards strewn with rhododendrons and flowering mountain laurel. Or the parched browns of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra foothills visible on smog-free days, where spring begins in February with white and purple bursts from tulip trees and dogwoods.

In a life spent moving from place to place, the predictability of landscapes both new and familiar has been a comfort, a well-worn bead to click against another through every iteration of hunger and praise. One of the many pangs of such constant motion is to leave each place both loving and mourning all you have come to know, and to go forward with five kinds of homesickness equally shared, the scent of new terroir on your skin and your spirit forever dogged by the genius loci endemic to each site.

Now I’m doing something different: going somewhere I mean to stay for good.

If I was chosen, before the world’s foundations, to belong to Mississippi, perhaps the edict was also levied that Minnesota—with its lakes, its corn-quilted farmland, its buried, white winters—would also be mine. I use the possessive here because it’s the first thought that occurred to me the first time the man who would become my husband drove me down the gravel driveway to the small hobby farm where he was born and raised.

Maybe it was intuition, but as the road bent before me, and slopes of small hills gave onto the ice of a newly frozen lake, a nearly audible voice in me muttered, “Ah, mine. Mine.”

I recognized it, as I had always recognized Mississippi. It was, just as Mississippi, as much a way of being, as place. And it was a place, I felt, that somehow knew me back.

And so, with circumstances finally right for the move, we are settling on that lake, just after that bend in the road, at the end of that particular driveway. My daughter will know its beauties and tediums by heart—both the summer raspberries and the late May snowmelt.

In moving there, however, we are leaving what by all objective standards is perhaps the most grand and impressive of any place I’ve ever lived—the Pacific Northwest. In our last few weeks here, I am trying to visit all the spots I’ve grown to love.

This morning, I drove my daughter, Ingrid, who turned eight-months-old today, to my old neighborhood of Queen Anne, atop of one of the highest hills in Seattle—a vantage point from which, on a clear day, one can see the Space Needle and the downtown skyline and Mount Rainier, looking more like a Japanese woodcut than an actual mountain. Turning right from that vista, the horizon is crested by the snowcapped Olympics and to the left by the snowcapped Cascades. Below traverse the barges and ferries of Puget Sound and on every side, another bungalow-bedecked hill.

I ordered my favorite coffee from my favorite coffee shop and walked with my daughter snuggled next to me in a carrier to the viewpoint at Kerry Park. I stopped for a good, long time. Ingrid, as is her wont, surveyed the buildings and rolling hills with focused intensity. “So this is Seattle?” she seemed to be thinking. “How interesting.”

I found myself hoping, as I watched her, that even though she will likely remember none of this consciously, that the colors would infiltrate her subconscious—the scarlet of Seattle geraniums, the blue of Chinese lilac, the green of massive fir trees, and the glacier-riven white of Rainier. I found myself wishing for her the benediction of this place to carry through the aridity of whatever blank hours await her, and its clean-aired consolation as a talisman against any future loneliness.

I remember in high school underlining many passages of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The one that has come to me again and again through many partings has been this: “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

I don’t know if, like her parents, Ingrid will need to wander a good, long time before she learns how to stand still. I consider it more than likely, for better or worse, that she will. But I hope that at night, even if only in dreams, she finds herself tracing the green hills of Seattle sloping down to Puget Sound, watching the ferries come and go, the snow clouds blanketing the rocky horizon.

A former regular contributor to “Good Letters,” Kelly Foster Lundquist was the 2012-13 Milton Fellow. She graduated with the first cohort of the Seattle Pacific Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2007. Her work has appeared in Image. She will soon be moving to Minnesota to teach English at North Hennepin Community College and to live beside the water with her family.

I first read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was thirteen. I discovered the book through an interview with Fiona Apple, one of the many female singer-songwriters whose mournful lyrics poured through my boom box speakers while I slogged my way through the kickboxing routine that, according to Seventeen, would slim my hips.

Thirteen was a difficult year; I was overweight, dorky, sarcastic, and sensitive. I spent my Friday nights eating Tombstone pizza and writing Tolkien fan fiction. And it was the last year my parents, whose marriage darkened our house, would live together under the same roof.

And what Angelou’s work did in my life, in that year, was phenomenal..

I remember faking sick, as I often did, to stay home and read the book (which was a better education than what my failing middle school had to offer, anyway). It was November, and the piercing headache that had followed me for months only subsided when I was alone, listening to music or reading, away from my parents and the girls who bullied me at school.

“You are too damn smart,” they would say when I spoke in class, their hair shiny from gel and glittering butterfly clips, their breasts perky beneath the powder blue uniform shirts that my mother had to buy in men’s sizes for me. We had the same route walking home, and I often lingered in my teachers’ classrooms at the close of day, hoping that by the time I left there would be enough of a distance between us for me to walk home in peace.

At home, the only true peace was absence: my mother at work, my father asleep. I stayed home when I could and sank into my books. And what I saw in Angelou’s world, even though it was so different from mine, was a world that also felt like my own: a young woman whose surroundings sought to diminish her, but who remained distinct, alive, and beautiful.

People praise Angelou for giving voice to the personal lives of African Americans during the blight of Jim Crow. And while her work certainly provides a picture of that era, it is more portrait than documentary, the characters of her family and friends—her grandmother, her daddy, the salvific Bertha Flowers—charged with an intensity that resonated with me deeply, intuitively, despite my being white. Angelou’s memoir illumined the inner lives of the people around her, demonstrating that racism and prejudice didn’t just deny opportunity, but crushed and twisted people from the inside out.

But the book also showed me that people had incredible power to both change and remain constant, to seek beauty, to find something within themselves and the world that was not only worth loving, but worth loving rightly.

And it is through Mrs. Flowers, the elegant woman who invited Angelou over in the months after her rape and gave her cookies, tea, and poetry, that Angelou’s words became the lifeline I caught. I saw what it meant to seek beauty, to welcome others. I wished that I had my own Mrs. Flowers, who would like me for just being Allison Backous.

But I also wished for the ache in my heart, which came from my parents’ unhappiness, from our town’s poverty, and from my own self-rejection, to be heard. I wished that I could give words to what I felt, and filled notebooks with rhyming poems that contained the words “undulating” and “convalescence” (which I learned from Fiona Apple).

After reading Angelou’s memoir, I asked for her poetry for Christmas. And although it was a freer form than I was used to reading, I found in it a way to ward off the nasty girls at school, and the nastier thoughts that kept me up at night, my mother’s car mysteriously absent from the driveway. Angelou’s poetry held the power of self-assertion, affirmed the size of my hips, and told me that there was courage and strength in me that could not be silenced.

It was that courage that helped me through the next round of difficult years, my parents’ divorce, my mother’s desperate need and abandonment, her boyfriend’s secret terrors. And to this day, that courage helps me carry my history and put it on the page.

When I have talked about the abuse that fills my family life, people have asked how I faced it all. What kept me going? Those are profound questions. I don’t have full answers. Does anyone fully understand her life while she’s living it?

]]>http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2014/06/24/maya-angelous-caged-bird-and-me/feed/0Can’t a Dad Hug His Boy?http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2014/06/17/cant-a-dad-hug-his-boy/
http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/2014/06/17/cant-a-dad-hug-his-boy/#commentsTue, 17 Jun 2014 19:09:42 +0000http://blog.spu.edu/mfa/?p=1678Continue Reading...]]>When I sat down to work at my computer yesterday morning, I checked my email and saw the stories on the news feed: another madman shoots random people; global warming disaster almost certain; radical politicians calling for rebellion, secession; the rich hoarding everything, the poor getting more desperate. I got off the Internet and clicked open the piece I am working on, and I stared at four pictures pinned to the cabinets in front of my writing desk.

One picture is a charcoal drawing of a human skull, my memento mori every morning as I sit down to work. The other three are curling snapshots from years ago hanging by a single thumb tack each.

The bottom one is of my boys at a cookout when Evan was not yet three and Asher was so young he could still delight himself to laughter just by running, happily unconcerned about his diaper-full of poop. The boys are in front of a picnic shelter in Kanawha Forest, and they are smudged and smeared face to bare feet with the grime of hard outdoor play. They are both squatting at a dog’s metal water bowl, splashing in it with sticks.

The middle photo is of Evan on my sister Alma’s lap. They both face the camera, her arms are wrapped around his chest and their faces are side by side—that they are related is clear by their sharp Sizemore chins.

The top photograph was taken by one of my employees at my old café, The Drowsy Poet. All three of the kids are at the sandwich board “helping” me prep for lunch. Asher and Grace are mangling mushrooms with serrated spreaders, and have stopped working to look at the camera. Grace still has a bit of a fat toddler head. At seven-years-old, Evan is slicing cucumber disks with a ten-inch bread knife. He looks down holding his fingers so carefully, his mouth tight in concentration, and his bangs splashed open at his cowlick.

Yesterday evening, Evan, my wife Liz, and I sat at the picnic table in our backyard near the woods. Despite the citronella candle, the mosquitos were thick, but the weather was so perfect we played out there anyway, swatting and waving as we rearranged tiles. Play was tight, jammed into the top right quarter for most of the game, none of us getting much for our words and no one willing to play a long word to break someone else out.

Then, at the end of the game, Evan pulled out a seven-letter word that earned him a quick sixty-two points. Liz and I made our plays, and the very next time, Evan traded out the blank tiles and created yet another seven-letter word, racking up seventy-eight points and soaring to the win.

After my writing time this morning, I ran over to the college to grab a couple of books from my office. I pulled a book off the shelf that I hadn’t opened in many years, to look for a passage that a friend’s Facebook post had me thinking about. In it I discovered a picture of Evan I didn’t even remember we had.

He is probably four years old, and he is in the backyard, unaware that he is being photographed. He holds his shirt up off his belly with his chin and chest, and his pants and underwear are gathered around his ankles as he pees on a tree.

Typical memories wash over me: the boy so fascinated with the world asking endless questions, the boy always ready to dive on me and wrestle, and play a roughhouse game—with his brother Asher, and eventually baby Gracie as well—that he had named “powie.”

In the midst of all our preparation for Evan’s graduation, and the end of the school year for Asher and Grace, the only thing I can think to do in the face of dire news and scary forecasts is hug my young man when he comes in from school and heads for the refrigerator, and his brother and sister as well.

The boys might find it odd because that’s not generally how I greet them after school—Gracie not so much since I hug on her all the time—but not so much that they will ask what’s going on.

I am glad, because I would only say something like, “Can’t a dad hug his boy?” What I would mean is this: You were out there, and again this time you came back, and that is reason enough.

Vic Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University in 2009. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Conclave, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. You can find Vic at http://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.